I’m at one of the many, oh so many, backyard-feeling bars in Austin, waiting on a friend and working on my movie concept. Today’s question: what ratio do I want between serious meditation and whimsy?
Also, will Kate Moss invite me in for tea when I ring her bell? She lives in Coleridge’s house, so I have to give it a shot. I imagine her inviting me in for tea. I have an excellent imagination.
The bartender made me a drink with ginger, Jameson’s and some third thing I forget. It’s … interesting.
We might have our executive producer and composer. This project is getting through the early stages pretty well. In about a month we’ll be filming the trailer for Kickstarter.
I woke up to my 100th follower. Thanks, Anna Bayes, “Writer of Erotic Romances for the Fiercely Loyal.” Lesbian flash fiction and a post on Sylvia Plath a day after I graded a dozen papers on “Daddy.”
Should I offer a prize for the 100th? Who’s it going to be? When’s it going to happen? I’m busting with anticipation.
A big thanks to all of you who are reading. I almost put “by the way” at the end of that, but it’s “by the way” at all. We all sit in rooms and write alone, with the hope – that hope we try to pretend we aren’t really feeling – that someone’s out there reading. Getting to 100 followers and who knows how many readers doesn’t put me in major blog category, actually, but I like all of you, lots.
Look soon for a linked blog to the production company I’m forming to make my first full-length documentary film, Romantic Places. I have to change that title. As I re-read Byron’s Childe Harold, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Shelley’s Frankenstein, the other Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge,” and so many others in preparation for the film, I’m hoping a phrase will jump out and say “I’m your title.”
I went to see Richard Linklater and others involved in the movie Boyhood speak today at the Texas State Capitol. Linklater, the film’s star, Ellar Coltrane, its producer and a photographer who took stills during most of the 12 years of the film and turned them into a book, spoke on a panel seated in the House of Representatives’ chamber. It was some of the most intelligent talk that’s been done in that room for years now.
Time and memory kept coming up. Linklater said making Boyhood, which he filmed for about a week every year for the past 12 years, gave him time to reflect mid-shoot in a way no other film has. He’d look over the footage, give himself time to think about it, and new ideas would mature over that time, he said. Some things were going to be in the film no matter what, but others evolved or developed because of that time.
The last of my videos for the class I co-teach on “Global Film and Literature” is finally done:
I’m happy with the editing. Eric did a great job, and he did it fast. I’m not so thrilled with my own performance. We rushed this one, and it looks like I’m drunkenly winking, which I’m not, because unlike the last video, “The Pub and Public Housing in TheCommitments,” we didn’t film this one in a pub.
But there’s a weird wink every so often anyway. I blame it on filming in the green screen room, which makes me feel claustrophobic and keeps me from even the slightest pretense of “relax … just be yourself,” along with the fact that I couldn’t remember my lines because I’d only written them the night before.
Oh well. We’ll film my part again next fall.
I’ll be better at my folk-rock version of “Anarchy in the UK” by then, or at least able to shift from an open C chord to an open F chord without pausing for several seconds. Guitar lessons begin in January.
Sitting in my study off my never-used patio, I spent the summer making false starts and trying to shrink ambitious ideas into manageable projects. I always have too many plans in my mind.
The one that’s come into clearest focus is either a film or a book (see, even the form is eluding me): Romantic Places: The Geography of British Romanticism. It’s a more personal account than that working title suggests. I first thought of it as a book, then started thinking it could be a movie. But can I really be the center of a 90-minute documentary? That fork in the road – book or film – is approaching soon. It’ll probably come down to funding. I’ve applied for one grant, and will be running a Kickstarter campaign in a couple of months. With enough money, it’ll be a movie. Without, it’ll be a book. But it’ll be something.
I’ve been reading books on geography and our place in it to work out some ideas. One of the ones I’ve been enjoying most is Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. He finds a universal “attachment to homeland,” which, he writes: Continue reading “Romantic Places – documentary in process”
Number one on today’s long to-do list is writing the first draft of a grant proposal for this coming summer’s documentary film on the spaces and places of Romanticism.
I meant to go to my desk and work on it, but since I’m having trouble leaving my sofa, thank the good baby Jesus for modern technology, particularly my tablet and phone with the camera hiding oh-so-cleverly inside there with all the videos of cats, emails, my calendar (which I always forget to look at — oops), and messages from my daughters asking for rides to inconvenient places at inconvenient times.
Today I taught a topic that means a lot to me. I say I “taught” it. In reality, I barely grazed it.
I’d love to shape a course centered on the idea of the neglected, suppressed, elided woman of the second half of the 20th century.
The topic is really my mother.
Charlotte Bayton Flynn was a a wonderful woman who buried herself, her thoughts, her feelings, and her life, for the most part. She was born in 1929, and since she was a woman, that was what was expected of her. Her husband had a job, she had children, and she did her duty.
But she did that duty, of course, while the world of women was changing. Betty Freidan published The Feminine Mystique (1963) the year before I was born. Sylvia Plath had published her poems and her autobiography, The Bell Jar, also just before I was born.
Back then I couldn’t have realized the history surrounding her life, or my own. I can piece it together now. My mother graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Journalism in 1952. Her mother also graduated from the University of Wisconsin, in 1917, with a degree in kinesiology. She was in the first class of women to graduate with that degree. She ended up teaching in Gary and Hammond, Indiana, mostly to African-American students.
Durty Nellies, next to Bunratty Castle. I had my first pint of Guinness here in 1983.
Eric and I have been working on our video about the “public,” which includes the “pub,” and “public housing.”
I’m not sure about all those quotation marks. I definitely want to set “public” off as an idea rather than just a word. I’ve been looking all over my house and office for a slim book I have by Alastair Hannay called , very simply, The Public. It has some of the answers I need. But it’s hiding, very private-like.
But the quotation marks feel like affectations, and they aren’t. I just mean that in this post, a pub isn’t a bar, and the public isn’t the crowd. Maybe?
In the video I ramble about pubs, and how the “public house” led to that term. I also ramble about public housing, which Rachael Neal then talks about more precisely. It’s good to have smart colleagues.
Maybe Durty Nellie’s, the pub pictured above, will come into the narrative. That’s the place where, aged 19, I had my first pint of Guinness. I was such a loser of a late teen that I asked the bartender:
“Am I old enough? I’m only 19.” And she said:
“Honey, this is Ireland. If you’re breathin’, you’re legal.”
Times have changed, but that was a golden age of random alcoholism
In the end, our students will have some entry into the fact that not all societies are built on the idea of individualism, and that Ireland, perhaps uniquely in the English-speaking world, is one of those countries that values the public over the private.
Video coming soon. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday. Eric’s editing. I’m doing voice-overs tomorrow. We’re making little-bitty movies on the fly. We’ll make them better next year, but this year we’re having a lot of fun and getting great practice.
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